Gliese 710.


"Elasticities"

dark states and entanglement
streets wasted · in the strong accord
strictly random · i describe forms
i embrace corrupt practice
as signifying something
from the later, well documented
portion of his career
places closed that will not reopen
bare trees in the cold sun
time for enhancing those skills
roar
of somewhere a motor
one route the less
available


"Typhoid runs the following course."

          "Tlalocan"

“…Or where the stark roof-tree
Of a burnt home blackened and sear lies dark,
Betwixt the gaunt-ribbed ruin, hast thou seen
The rose of peace…” --Sydney Dobell, Balder: Part the First (1854)

Driving on a drizzly morning, I hear “Hey Joe” by Jimi Hendrix and idly wonder whence its building triumph derives. It’s a dirge, but a dirge of victory. Surely not for unpunished murder?

“The black swan of trespass on alien waters” --Ern Malley

There are layers here. First, the blues song. You can sense a bedrock here compounded of guilt and remorse, for which the indirect narrative only partly accounts. This darkness might stem from alcoholism or some other social abjection; however, its meaning has been lost by the time the Sixties rolled through and took from the Blues more inflection than innuendo.

“Departed am I who loathe the snow/ of my summers” --Robot X, 1627.

That stark plot, which forms fugitive agency out of its confrontation between two codes—civil law and the ego’s law of possessiveness—stands for a more timely opposition, known then and for decades thereafter by the name of “Counterculture.”

“ ‘Playful or rude. That’s the difference between good chaos and bad chaos…’ ” --Lyda Morehouse, Messiah Node (2003)

And in the moment of Hendrix’s rendition, the Counterculture was finding itself numerous, visibly other, and martial with its flower power trinity of free love, rock ‘n’ roll, and sacramental marijuana.

“The Jabberwock will set his jaw a notch
And vaguely chew Cuchulain for a day.” --Jack Spicer

Listening to it now, I can’t help but be reminded that the mechanism of commercial radio supplying me with this very anthem, piercing the ether as comfort music for ageing Boomers wracked with bright-minted apocalypse at the deliquescence of their unprecedented privilege, gives that revolution the lie.

“In our house of lamentation
We light the candle from the lightning.” --Mirza Ghalib

Yet consumerism has failed to extinguish that part of urban nomadics later dubbed “the homeless”: and no longer triumphant, but given back to its first grief, the old song claims new poignancy in the hour of its return.

“I do not want / a leg, I want/ a floor” --Robot X, 1038.

Gwyneth Jones, in her 2004 novel Life, talks about being “elective refugees.” To see plain causality, to know Peak Oil, and to interpret our common unstoppable future, is to set oneself apart from the religion of the state, is to turn off the opiate of the masses and to step outside, under a rather troubled sky; entering into his gnosis without deliverance, you drop a caste, you cease to count in the vote on who gets to keep playing the game or game of games. You are here on sufferance. Call it dhimmitude.

“Later times may again live in palaces. Ours is the founding time, the time of tents. It makes no sense to build palaces today, since no people exist for whom it would be appropriate to live in them.” --Stefan George

That term, which originally signalized a clemency toward religious dissidence unknown in the medieval West, was recently resurrected by Bat Ye’or to describe a paranoid fantasy of being enslaved by the creeping tide of Islam; in other words, the richest by the poorest of the poor. (So might an Afghan tribesman’s curse bring down the jet bearing “smart” munitions.)

“the occiput which rolls is ecstatic” --Javant Biarujia

But as there is no corresponding word for the state of being a Muslim in Christian society, so must this term also serve, by ineluctable metonymy, for its mirror-twin: and we who feel this condition and know it for our own, might just as well pass for Mozarabs, as try to remain neutrally non-Consumer.

“Sugar is not a vegetable.” --Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

I am concerned above all with remaining a writer outside of the writing scenes. (One way or another materially I’ll pull through.) This cannot be done without a stance, a practice, that is more than just fashionably rebellious.

“A poet almost has to invent his own land and then has to defend it.” --Spicer

There’s no nourishment in the pose, and of course the real transgression will out: your cancer sun, your indifference to the threat of having to walk somewhere.

“And do not heed those fools who say that these Companions were expert calligraphers and that their errors are only apparent, having a symbolical hidden meaning…” --Ibn Khaldun, in: An Arab Philosophy of History, ed & tr Charles Issawi (1950)

“BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light.” --Mina Loy

“If you’ll exchange, I’ll give to you
Bokhara—yes! and Samarcand.” --Hafiz, Wine for a Breaking Heart (tr Richard Le Gallienne, 1903)

" 'Islâm--the very word means the surrender of the human will to the will of God,' said Count Anteoni. 'That word and its meaning lie like the shadow of a commanding hand on the soul of every Arab, even of the absinthe-drinking renegades one sees here and there who have caught the vices of their conquerors. In the greatest scoundrel that the Prophet's robe covers there is an abiding and acute sense of necessary surrender. The Arabs, at any rate, do not buzz against their Creator, like midges raging at the sun in whose beams they are dancing.' " --The Garden of Allah

"Perfect Patience"

foregone
on the polluted air
such conditions as
been gauss dragon dragon the wings and
knowing so
much and so little

how possibly map this changes little else
foregone dust
whose boots aren't made for walking

and my perfect patience fries
carving, like farseeing smoke
blurring
someone that small


Why Paint Cats?

"El Area 51"

A frost of unsatisfactory
whirling passes and fails
tumor atlas
the child whose face wouldn't twitch
when walked across by flies
Borg Buddha
the fundamental
questionability
of precrime methodology
rain beating
on the high skylight
a hundred intervening
feet of semidarkness
leaving in a storm
leaving what you know
leaving what you've learned
to accept as reality
whirling the fundamental
questionability

of precrime methodology


"But even if art and poetry have no use, it does not follow that they have no value." --Chesterton


A House in Fez.


"The first rap single ...contained an entire verse, rapped by Big Bank Hank, that was in fact written entirely by another rapper..."

"Frozen Dead Man Days"

1.
siamese squids
cities before & after
their famous disaster
skip
the chapters in your travel guide
accordingly
glow in the pewter sky
circular
i hear a dim twittering i look
the dark trees
on both sides full of birds
i hear through the rolled up windows
and my radio

2.
mem'ries of being cold
pellder
at the people struck by lightning convention
the sky becoming paler
but still dark
above the deserted industrial park
its asphault and its stalled cars
and my path traced there
repeatedly
like a sound only i can hear
gold
at the mouth of the tunnel


Uncle Andy's.


Steampunk Chronology. (via Beyond the Beyond)

"I sent this little book...to two publishers, one conservative, one liberal. The conservative one politely turned it down, though it had come recommended by a leading conservative intellectual. The liberal one offered me a contract and sent me a small advance. The publisher, however, overruled her very liberal editors because she found ideas in the book that she could not stomach."


The New Dropout Economy. (via Beyond the Beyond)

"Old Spider After Shave"

drones pursue
what psychic ability tarries
in Reich Carcosa
buns for gutter probably

computer-generated random tattoos
and halcyon spent looking days
full of orpiment
and forward only and engraved fedora

my disease steadily improving
t'ward sorrow


John Pascuzzi thread.


"Maybe we don’t understand the sensual—the literal use of our senses, because we no longer have a food or physical culture much connected to the—empirical, to a tangible reality. (Is that the right way to put it?). This is why things like psychoanalysis, meditation, or fertility seem magical, mystical to us. They are so at odds with our rootless versions of sex and eating, which are decreasingly tethered to our own senses, which in turn are decreasingly tethered to the natural world."


I Wish I Knew How To Quit You, Pluto.


"The new baseline statement and the BPFK have done incalculable damage to the project..."

70 Virginis b--the coffee mug.

In response to this, i wrote: "this is good but it disregards an essential difference between kinds of people.

the models would not be the same for introverts & extraverts; & i suspect that each of the 16 Jungian types has its own specific social needs.

because the types are not equally prevalent, the more common ones’ needs drown out the perceptibility of the needs of the less common types (some are 100 times more common than others).

you might rather look at it from the point of view of the ideal tribe, which would (say) have one of the very least common types, but no more than their fair number of the most common types; but what happens in today’s world, is a mediated sorting-out of like with like, so that grossly unbalanced tribes form, with a consensus that is biased toward things it is easy for those of that type to believe.

this is how we end up so deluded en masse."


Build Your Own Army of Web Bots Within 24 Hours.


"But when the movie people actually made a film called I, Robot, the story that was filmed had nothing to do with Isaac’s actual stories but was something written and published by another writer, and all they used of Isaac’s work was the title and the Three Laws. Neither of which had been his." (via Metafilter)


M John Harrison responds to Elmore Leonard's list with a list of his own.